


The colours that they chose

by Goonlalagoon



Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: F/M, M/M, Rambly post RtD musings on the majors, The shipping is fairly background, and inherent issues of systems that make you pick one lifelong category on day one, this started as Red/Leaf fluff and spiralled somewhere more grief stricken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 13:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11715522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: Jack wasn’t the first to think that Leaf’s armband was as green as his name only because of where he was from, not who he was. Most of the stable-loft crew had assumed he was a wannabe combat spec, and once or twice he’d been mistaken for a denied hero (he’d laughed so hard he fell off a chair when Gloria told him she’d thought for a while he’d wanted the purple badge, to be leading the charge; he fell into directing people so easily when the battle for Driftwood island came, she’d said, and he grinned and asked her if she’d like to go tell Nurse to her face that healers weren’t allowed to give instructions like they were supposed to be followed)





	The colours that they chose

Jack wasn’t the first to think that Leaf’s armband was as green as his name only because of where he was from, not who he was. Most of the stable-loft crew had assumed he was a wannabe combat spec, and once or twice he’d been mistaken for a denied hero (he’d laughed so hard he fell off a chair when Gloria told him she’d thought for a while he’d wanted the purple badge, to be leading the charge; he fell into directing people so easily when the battle for Driftwood island came, she’d said, and he grinned and asked her if she’d like to go tell Nurse to her face that healers weren’t allowed to give instructions like they were supposed to be followed)

The Academy would have sent his application form back green no matter what he’d written, and that was wrong; mere years after he first sent his letters and references in, that would change for the better. But Leaf had wanted to be a guide, first and foremost. He had wanted to see people safe, fed, to heal and help them. He had wanted to be able to keep people from getting hurt in the first place, and when the system had not let him he’d set out to do it anyway.

No-one had questioned Red’s decision to join the combat spec major. They had questioned his decision to go to the Academy at all - his extended family’s mild disapproval at going official, his close family’s regret at seeing him go. The Dreads were seafaring vigilantes. Once he wore the Academy uniform, he’d be alone in a way he had never been before - people wanted by the Bureau for the repeated crime of saving peoples lives without a licence couldn’t exactly pop along for a visit, or drop into ports to send letters on a reliable basis. His fellow students had questioned why he ran training sessions for the other majors and had questioned why he bothered coming to the Academy at all, if he thought so little of it’s system

Red was the only one who questioned his major, on lonely dawn walks when he woke too early to the shriek of gulls and was startled to find the floor steady beneath his feet, on days when he felt he spent every waking minute surrounded by people who thought being strong was the same as being a bully. A few months into his repeated final year Clem started talking about the sage major with a wistfulness in his voice that would surprise anyone who hadn’t listened to him puzzle over riddles and maths, and Red wondered idly what life would have been like as a guide. He didn’t tell this to Jack, who he knew wouldn’t understand, or Clem, who would suggest he jump ship with the enthusiasm of someone who was making a decision and had never previously realised there was a choice.

He did tell Leaf, offhandedly during one of the long days of his recovery after the battle at Rivertown. Over the years at the Academy he had snatched daydreams of gentleness, of a life that was about fixing and mending rather than sharpening blades. Leaf had squinted at him for a moment, said ‘hey, who’re you calling gentle?’, then insisted on showing him how to brew some basic medicines and promised to take him out way finding once he was able to walk further than to the end of the room without going grey with pain. Leaf didn’t tell Jack either, because it wasn’t his business and because Leaf didn’t think Jack would understand the appeal of being a guide when you were already a combat spec.

(Jack understood better than either of them imagined what it was to have a sick weight at the back of your mind made up of the names of everyone who had died because of you, for you, and before you. Jack had known before he saw the Academy what it was to choose a path that you knew was hard, and painfull, and cruler than you wanted to imagine. He never told them about the weight of a stocked healer’s bag in shaking hands, life-saving medicines at his fingertips that he didn’t know how to use and guilt that he would never leave behind. He had begged lessons in herb lore everywhere he and George travelled, but applied to be a combat spec because he thought that was what he needed to learn in order to save people)

When they split into the baby Leagues, after Driftwood Island brought the study group’s antics to light and Heads decided that seeing as everyone else was clearly now going to be off doing dangerous vigilante city-saving the moment he turned his back anyway he may as well let it be official and make sure that some safety nets were included, they found that roles became less defined. You stopped being able to guess what someone brought to the team by the colour around their arm.

You had never been able to guess what they brought to the team - you had just made assumptions. Sez had said, once, that the colour coding was less defined outside of the Academy, but even she hadn’t known about the way gold fell from Grey’s fingers but had to be wrested from the world by Laney, though she’d known that when it came down to it Laney would pull a gun as coolly as any hero or combat spec. The colours had never been the full picture.

In active service, lives in the balance and no longer just classroom theoretics, they fell into new roles, merged them and shared them, skill sets offered up and used wherever they fit. Red had still been their combat spec, because they all knew he was the epitome of what the role should be. Francis Uyeda had chosen the red armband because he knew himself and exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Leaf was a guide, first and foremost, and he clung to it, wore a green armband even in exile because it was the colour that told the world what mattered most to him.

Their other guide major was startled to find he filled a mage’s shoes, nowadays. As a child Weeds had dreamt of golden sparks at his fingers because he was scared and small in his skin, and he couldn’t imagine being brave and powerful without an otherworldly force to wield. But his fingers were nimble, with a wiry strength he knew he could rely on after days of finding the tough roots of small plants by touch in the undergrowth and pulling them free. He had signed up for the guide major because he didn’t think he fit anywhere else and there were things there that he liked.

Gloria wouldn’t have signed up for the hero major even if it had been an option for her, because she didn’t know when she sat in her room and wrote her careful explanations and practice essays that she had a flair for it, that she would stand before a fire demon and know - that she’d know where the others were, who was struck numb by fear and who was about to do something foolish, who needed encouragement and who needed to be shouted at and who just needed her pure expectation that they could and would do this to believe it themselves. She had decided to apply to be a sage because she wanted to know about things, she wanted to squint at the world and be able to find the sense in it.

When they talked about Clem, over the years, Gloria and Leaf were always very clear that he changed his mind was different from he made the wrong choice. Clem had been a combat spec because he thought it was where he fit, and he had - but he’d started to see somewhere he could fit better. In the years after the battle for Rivertown, Gloria would run a strip of grey between her fingers and remind herself fiercely that they’d called him a sage and meant it, no matter what the paperwork said.

They’d formed their own Leagues, and they’d all chosen their colours.


End file.
